


Stop Me If You've Heard This One

by brawltogethernow



Category: Marvel, Scarlet Spider (Comics), Spider-Man (Comicverse)
Genre: Canon-Typical Mindreading, Domestic Fluff, Gen, by two people who don't know how to do anything normally, further instances of kaine being bullied into finding community with mixed results, religion? oh you mean that thing that eventually causes people to hold bake sales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:07:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24856564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brawltogethernow/pseuds/brawltogethernow
Summary: So a clone of a Jewish man and an amnesiac teen who might be an actual Aztec deity walk into a Catholic church--
Relationships: Kaine Parker & María Aracely Penalba
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	Stop Me If You've Heard This One

So the problem starts, the problem starts when Kaine agrees to go to a bake sale.

This little old lady put her hand on his face, see? What are little old ladies doing putting their hands on his face? Doesn’t she know he could snap her neck with a finger twitch?

“You are a good Catholic boy,” she says. “I know one when I see one,” she interrupts when he opens his mouth to protest, though he wasn’t yet decided which descriptor to zero in on first. “You are always at confession.”

Kaine may, possibly, have been using confession as a kind of no-papers-required stand-in for therapy. Or maybe a no-blood-shed-Aracely-isn’t-glaring-at-me stand-in for hurting himself.

He has enough brain cells not to say this. Barely.

“Thank you,” he says instead, and tries to pull away.

She leans with him. Her hands remain on his face.

“But I never see you anywhere else!” she says. “You _must_ come to the bake sale. It’s on Friday.”

“Okay,” says Kaine’s mouth entirely without his input. He was born with an inbuilt structural weakness against little old battle axes. He attributes this to the ghost echoes of Peter Parker’s idyllic childhood.

-

“So what are we making?” demands Aracely as soon as he returns to the presidential suite. “Lemon bars? People on TV make lemon bars. What _is_ a lemon bar?”

Sometimes, Kaine is more glad than anything that she's always eavesdropping on the inside of his head. Often, he’d cut off a limb, hell, all his limbs, to keep her out. He'd grow a bunch of spider legs _again_ and then cut those off. He’s not sure exactly where this falls between the two extremes. But definitely closer to the negative side.

“Oh,” she says as if he answered, tipping her head. She’s turned around on the couch and sat up on her knees and braced her arms on the back of it to see him better. “You don’t know either. That’s okay, we can Google it.”

-

So they burn the kitchenette a little bit.

"We can rebuild it," says Arcacely. "We have the technology."

He definitely leaves her in front of the TV too much. But what's the alternative, bringing her with him more?

"Yes, it is," says Aracely like he spoke out loud. "And that is but one more reason why you should do that."

"Hell no," says Kaine, and books it out of the suite fast enough that he can pretend he didn't hear her shout, " _Swear jar!_ "

-

He finds the maid who most often handles their rooms. He hands her a stack of hundreds for her trouble, then hands her a couple more because he can tell the exchange has scared her. He tells her the hotel can bill him the damages. And then he asks her how to get to the hotel kitchen.

Aracely appears, out of breath, as he finishes bribing his way into use of a stove. Her ability to do this is one reason among many why he doesn't own a cellphone.

"You could have just asked them," she chirps, methodically going through the room and opening, examining, and then closing every drawer. It's empty right now, so there's no one to stop her. "I think they would have just let us use the kitchen. The people here like you."

"No, they don't," corrects Kaine. "And who cares? It's not like we need to save money." He can just go hit more human traffickers if he runs low. And since he spends a lot of his time doing this even when he's not running low, he is in absolutely no danger of running low. He's pretty sure he could buy a yacht, or a politician.

"Success!" proclaims Aracely, and when Kaine turns around she's holding a clear plastic tub of brown powder over her head. There's a piece of paper laminated to the side with text printed on it that _might_ be a recipe. "Brownie mix!"

-

"That is not food," declares Aracely of their creation. "No one is going to buy that."

Kaine leans over to examine it. It's kind of...grainy.

"Brownie sand," says Aracely. "Could we start a new trend?"

Kaine sighs. They should have known trying to quarter the banquet-sized serving on the tub was a bad idea. They have clearly miscalculated on some ephemeral measurement level. They've angered the baking gods.

"Are there baking gods?" inquires Aracely.

"Why don't you ask the Catholics," says Kaine, and tugs her away to tip the cleaning staff _again_.

-

“This is good too,” says Aracely, presiding over the storebought tubs of those weird shitty grocery store cookies that are mostly icing that they brought instead.

“I don’t even know how I got here,” says Kaine. “What are we doing here?”

His nose twitches. He’s not sure if one of them still smells like burnt lemons or if he’s just imagining it. He does know that he’s avoiding anything lemony for a _long_ time.

-

The woman who got him into this sidles up to them shortly after they set up, looking _very_ pleased to see him there.

"Always good to see fresh faces," she says, and winks at him.

She continues to talk in a way that stays steadily one step to the left of him feeling like he has a firm grasp on the conversation. Possibly that's because he's overthinking things and doubting whether he's correctly interpreting a single word she's saying. What even _is_ "the congregation", in this context?

He looks at Aracely.

She shrugs.

Is it a list. Do you have to complete a set of tasks to qualify. Are there membership cards?

Aracely shrugs a little more beffudledly. Her reeducation via television and following a vigilante around active crime scenes must not have taught her about this.

-

The bake sale is to raise money to fix the air conditioner. This means that the building is the same temperature inside as it is outside. The best description he can come up with for the response the people in the room are having to the sweltering temperature is "cheerfully miserable".

Other than that it's...weird. Festival-ish? It kind of plucks the strings of memories that don't belong to him of May Parker presiding over neighborhood events with an endlessly gentle iron fist, but it also doesn't. He also kind of feels like he is impersonating someone who is actually supposed to be here. But _that's_ nothing new.

There is a big confused snarl in Kaine's chest made mostly of other people's experiences that he can't even begin to interpret if he pings himself about the concept of "God". He thought that might be a problem if he just walked in here and...socialized.

It is not. No one is asking him about God.

" _What_ do you think about the setup this time?" a woman with a thin mouth and long, spindly fingers demands. Her lipstick is the same shade as Annabelle's hair and her turtleneck suggests a total lack of concern for the wet Houston heat that Kaine finds honestly terrifying.

"The--?" he starts to answer.

"It's definitely for the best they didn't decide to hold it in the _basement_ again," she continues, saving him from answering her not-really-a-question. "I mean, why? The lobby has all these lovely windows."

She gestures. Kaine nods along, his adrenaline spiking more than it ever has for any interaction with a werewolf or a most dangerous game type with a knife.

Thus follows a brief interaction where Kaine hums or nods when appropriate, and in return learns that she's very invested in the greater accessibility of the lobby, she plays piano on a volunteer basis for the church, and she knows he's "one of Marie's injections of fresh blood" but doesn't seem interested on calling him out for not belonging here.

"Do come to the community breakfast tomorrow," she finishes, buys two cookies, and leaves.

The emotional aftermath is akin to having weathered a near-death experience.

-

Aracely has found an older couple to speak Spanish with and is chirping away at the same blistering clip typical of her English, but with a more fluid cadence that betrays it's at least one of her native languages. The in-his-head thing doesn't really go both ways, so he has no idea what they're talking about. Probably something he'd regret knowing. _What if she is asking them about baking gods._

A guy in a priest...collar...thing _..._ who Kaine hopes _desperately_ is not the one he sometimes monopolizes, or, failing that, does not recognize him, has sprouted up to make polite conversation.

"Not a bad turnout today, eh?" he says.

"Good thing they moved it back into the lobby," tries Kaine.

The priest beams at him like he's repeated the secret code.

" _So_ true," he says.

Kaine is totally mastering churches. This is great. He bets if it were Peter in his place he would have started a fight by now.

-

"I think that went well," says Aracely after they've retreated to the suite and she's curled back up on the couch with a bowl of...something. She stabs the contents of the bowl with a spoon. "We should definitely do that again. Socializing with your community is almost as important as scaring away all its drug lords!"

"They're not my community," says Kaine. Not just the Catholic church a few blocks away from the hotel, which he still thinks he prefers from inside an anonymous guilt box. _Houston_ is not Kaine's _community_. He does not have, does not _get to have,_ a community. (Aracely rolls her eyes in an _incredibly_ teenagery way, projecting exasperation either at his answer or his train of thought.) "What are you _eating?_ "

She salutes him with her spoon. "Brownie sand! It's very edible!"

" _Ichh_ ," says Kaine.

"It's good for you!" Aracely declares. She looks dubiously down at her bowl, and corrects, "It's not actively bad for you!"

"No more chocolate," says Kaine. "No more lemons. No."

"But maybe some more bake sales?"

"... _Maybe_."

"Yes!"

**Author's Note:**

> Last year the Girl Genius Discord was talking about how the Marvel wiki categorizes characters by religious affiliation, which led to questioning why Kaine Parker was listed as Catholic. I reported back several months later after I read Scarlet Spider that it was because he started going to confession after being thrown through a church wall, which prompted gelpens to pitch the mental image of Kaine showing up to one of the less cinematic things people do in churches.


End file.
